Hi all,
Dave Beckett is preparing a new release of libcairo2 (see [1]) after a
request from the Debian Installer team to add a udeb compiled against the
directfb backend and not against the X backend. This udeb will be used by
the d-i team for the graphical installer.
There is one issue that Dave and we have not been able to decide on, and
that is the need for a separate libcairo2-directfb package.
This is the set of packages currently produced from the sources [2]:
libcairo2_1.1.8-1_i386.deb
libcairo2-dev_1.1.8-1_i386.deb
libcairo2-directfb-dev_1.1.8-1_i386.deb
libcairo2-directfb-udeb_1.1.8-1_i386.udeb
libcairo2-doc_1.1.8-1_all.deb
The udeb will provide the library to be used in the d-i environment at
run-time and this has already been tested and is OK.
However, we also need to be able to build other udebs that link against
libcairo2 (e.g. pango depends on cairo).
This means at least the libcairo2-directfb-dev package, but is the library
itself also needed?
- Normally a -dev package depends on a corresponding lib package.
- The symbol tables between the library in the udeb and the library in the
regular library package differ [3].
This is also where it gets really complex as compiling pango specifically
against libcairo2-directfb would imply that we also need a separate
variant of pango, but so far we've been running a "normal" pango library
against a cairo2-directfb library in the graphical installer without any
obvious problems (like missing symbols).
It may be that we're missing obvious stuff here, so comments/suggestions
from experienced library wizards are very welcome.
A libcairo2-directfb library deb could also be generally useful for other
projects based on directfb.
TIA for your help,
Frans Pop
(Thanks to Davide Viti for writing the first draft of this message)
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2006/06/msg00686.html
[2] For those who want to take a look, they are available from:
http://download.dajobe.org/debian/experimental/
[3] The attached diff shows the differences (readelf output with first
2 columns removed) between the lib included libcairo2 and the one
in libcairo2-directfb-udeb.